Imaginative vision of space in geopolitics: approach to study

The vision of space in critical geopolitics, expressed through the image, is defined. The geopolitical concept of space is interpreted as the result of the geopolitical interaction of the latter with the outside world. Its historical development, the nature of organisation and behavior in relation to other geopolitical entities play a decisive role in this regard. The accumulation of these processes over time forms the semantics of stereotypical political ideas about space, such as: mission, security, buffering, a tendency to integrate and interpenetrate attractiveness, conflict, centrality, peripherality, etc., expressing themselves in a geopolitical image. The images of space, which are becoming increasingly important in geopolitical interaction, direct modern geopolitics to a deeper understanding of the status, role and orientation of various entities expressing geopolitics. A system-representative model of the study of the geopolitical image of space as a basis of methodological orientation, presented as the main idea of the study, has been developed. The model synthesises the interaction between the main factors and elements that form the geopolitical vision of space, which are projected onto its image in a dependent relationship. With this model, we defend the idea of launching an algorithm that adequately structures the process of forming a geopolitical image of space. The attributes that determine the formation of the geopolitical image of space have been displayed: factors of perception of space of internal and external character; sources of space perception (social experience and education, art, media products, maps, media); geopolitical identification; geopolitical identity; geopolitical discourse; semantic stratification and the scale of the geopolitical image.